Podstar Runner 2006

From Homestar Runner Wiki

The original Podstar Runner is a collection of cartoons transferable to a video capable portable media player (such as a fifth-generation iPod), in .m4v format. It was released simultaneously with the email technology. Originally a collection of Strong Bad Emails, Teen Girl Squad episodes were added on March 6, 2006 under the name Teen Girl Squadcast. On April 12, 2006, the Toon Everybody to the Limit was released. On March 1, 2007, a "podcast" button was added to the navbar at the bottom of the Homestar Runner site, yet the "sbemail podcast!" button continued to appear at the end of the message cycle every week until July 16, 2007. Podstar Runner was usually updated Thursdays, along with the three weeklies buttons.

The service was discontinued in September 2007 with a note saying "Podcasts are gone for now. We'll tell them you were thinking about 'em though." A new Podstar Runner service was made available on January 10, 2008.

The clock at the top of the iPod screen reads 8:04 before and after the toon.

With the exception of Homsar's appearance in dragon, none of the clickable Easter eggs from the original versions of the emails are present.

All the Easter eggs (except for "She Likes Cloth" from issue #12) in the Teen Girl Squad issues are present, and play automatically, as does the Peasant's Quest Preview egg.

The notice on the main page originally said "sbemail podcast!" but it was later changed to "sbemails on ipod!". This was most likely changed after noting that Podstar Runner was not truly a podcast, due to the videos not being broadcast through a RSS feedsyndication. As of February 6, 2006, however, an official RSS feed has been released making Podstar Runner an actual podcast. On March 5, 2006, it was changed to "teen girl squadcast!" in response to the new feature.

The sound quality in the iPod version of bottom 10 seems to drop to the "Flash file" level after the appearance of Wet The Cheat. There also seems to be a minor sound bug while Strong Bad has the jibblies. Furthermore, on the dry T-shirt flyer, the font Snap ITC has been replaced with what appears to be Arial (same thing for the font for Chocolardiac Arrest).

The podstar.homestarrunner.com server doesn't have the 404'd page set up; incorrect URLs will get the standard 404 error page instead.

Due to the size and resolution of the iPod's screen, virus's Navbar is removed, and its "widescreen" effects removed by pan and scan.

On February 27, 2006, Podstar Runner ceased downloads of all the previously available Strong Bad Emails and only allowed downloads of the most recent Podcast. A notice on the page read "due to bandwidth doodoo, we're doing one at a time for now." It was fixed on March 3, 2006, and all the emails could be downloaded again.

In the Teen Girl Squad Issue 1 podcast, the "It's Over!" card appears after the Strong Bad Easter egg to match the endings of the other issues.

In death metal, the email intro seems to be a little extended. Plus, the "shee-doot" sound is omitted when Strong Bad signs off of Video Thyme.

Every time an email was added to the website's episode list from 2006-2007, another one that has been released for quite some time was removed because the maximum capacity for the list of emails was 18. This also happened on the podcast on iTunes itself.

While the iPod in the background is meant to be a fifth generation model, the headphone port is placed in the top center of the device like a fourth generation's, rather than at the top right. However, as of January 10, 2008, it has been replaced with an iPod Touch.

When the email ends and returns to the animated iPod menu, "Homestarrunner.com" is highlighted. However, the animated menu at the beginning of the email has "Email" selected. The iPod's memory should keep the selection where it was when you left it, not move back to the top.

Many of the listed file sizes are inaccurate. The table below shows the correct file sizes.

The preview picture for Teen Girl Squad 9 (in iTunes) has positioning problems; everything inside the panel seems to be shifted up and to the left, overlapping the panel border.

The sound in crazy cartoon is out of sync between the intro and the ending.

In the XML feed, the description of crying was the same as that of kids' book, namely "Strong Bad seriously defaces a children's book." This has since been fixed.

There used to be two podcasts available through iTunes Music Store: one by "Strong bad" and one by "The Brothers Chaps". Noticeably different between the two was the logo of the two podcasts, as well as the absent "Clean" marker in the second podcast. The podcast by Strong Bad has since been removed.

When guitar was released, all the email links became the same, all leading to the guitar email file. Now they have reverted back to the separate names.

When montage was released, the link to download montage was incorrect in the XML feed, which pointed to "sb_email_motage.m4v" instead of "sb_email_montage.m4v", leaving users temporarily unable to download montage through iTunes. This was fixed the day after.

The date for theme park in the podcast feed was incorrectly listed as May 6, 2006 instead of June 6, 2006.

Due to the use of relative linking in the navbar (and depending on the browser), clicking on any of the links on the bottom of the page will sometimes work correctly but will sometimes take you to a nonexistent page beginning with http://podstar.homestarrunner.com/, with the Store being the only exception. This was fixed when "podcast" was added to the navbar.